Toe in the Water

The Future of Archaeology

The Future of Archaeology

A good friend in South Africa, who enjoys the occasional joke, ended his most recent email with his thought:

“Oh and by the way, a warning. If you’re buying a watch on Amazon and it says that you can swim with it, it only applies if you can already swim without it.”

To which I could not resist replying:

“I am taking swimming lessons in case I ever want to buy a watch on Amazon.”

After a brief thought, I added the following:

“Think how that will puzzle archaeologists if all they ever find is this email. Without the info contained in the final sentence of your last message, my statement is pure insanity. But there, we don't consider the sanity of future archaeologists when we're going about our normal lives so they can hardly expect us to make it easy for them. In fact, when you think about all the detritus of our civilisation we leave behind us, some of it deliberate as in the case of time capsules, one can hardly envy those archaeologists in their chosen profession, the study of ourselves. The profession today sometimes bemoans having to deduce so much from so little evidence, but in the future they'll be sifters of needles from mountains of hay. How they will curse our addiction to such imperishable stuff as plastics.”

Which is the philosophical thought for the day, I guess.


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